Image from the Facebook community with the same name
For those who have been reading my blogs, the title of this blog post may strike a familiar ring. One of my previous entries was, I Met My God . I felt the need to refer to this because the entry I am writing today is completely different in intent and tone than from what I wrote in, "I Met My God". In, "I Met My God", I was being intentionally sarcastic so that I could vent out my rage at a world which seems to have lost the true God. Today I am going to write about my true God. What should God be doing in a blog on social entrepreneurship, I guess, we should have figured it out by the end of this blog: hopefully !!
I have always believed in God. I don't go to temples, I don't burn incense sticks and I don't observe any of the rituals associated with any religion. But I have believed in him/her. I rarely even pray to him/her, having only prayed in times of great distress; occasions, which I can count on my fingers. Yet, in my entire life span there was perhaps only about a week where I decided to be an atheist: the evidence in favour of him/her were so overwhelming that my atheism caved in a single week. And much of it is to do with NEEV. I realized, ever so firmly that NEEV is a story that begins with God and is being scripted by God: as is everything else in life.
The last few days have been some of the toughest days in my life. Over the years, I have come to realize that it is not the outer, physical circumstances that have proved tough for me. The toughest times have been those where faith in my basic principles and values of life started dwindling. And this is what actually happened in the last few days. Actually, it was an accumulation of many events which got concentrated in my consciousness. Again, it was all about NEEV, for NEEV is the laboratory, the microcosm where I have learnt much about the ways of God: how he/she creates, preserves and destroys.
The entire field of social entrepreneurship is rife with what I call "system thinkers" System thinkers believe that by changing systems, by changing the models of finance and bringing in "social innovations", the world would transform. When we started out with NEEV, social entrepreneurship was practically unheard of, a far cry from the global attention that this word garners today. In fact when I first started using the word social entrepreneurship I proudly thought that I had coined the word. I must admit that I was dismayed to learn much later that this word had already been coined by Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka and frankly even more dismayed when I learnt about his "elitist" concept of social entrepreneurship. If there is one word that I have begin to hate in the social entrepreneurship circles, it is "scaling up". In fact, I thought and even think strongly till today that social entrepreneurship should give a damn about "scaling up". That's not it's intent, direction or purpose.
For me and for us at NEEV, social entrepreneurship is about discovering the consciousness of soul and spirit in the self and the community and ultimately to create an organization that lives these higher dimensions of human existence. I thought we finished with words like "systems" and "models" and "scaling up" in conventional entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneurship is about practicing relationships and values rather than making scalable models. Models are important but not as starting points, rather, when they emerge organically from the collective soul and spirit of a community. Unfortunately such a view does not attract much of funding today.
So for me, though being a social enterprise, NEEV was never meant to be a platform to "scale social innovations". It was more about discovering the power of human consciousness, both in the individual self and the collective. It was and it continues to be a search for human goodness and virtues of togetherness, love and friendship in a world where relationships form and break with the eccentricity of stock markets. Through thick and thin I have striven to live this, in the face of people forsaking my trust, conning me for money, deceiving me and breaking relationships. Each time my basic faith in human goodness was attacked by happenings inside and outside NEEV, I went into my shell only to be thrown back into world by a divine wave, my faith restored.
A few days back, I was in my shell, dark as ever: hurt, tired and broken. My faith in human goodness had dwindled. Two of the core members with which we started were no longer with NEEV. My close friend, who was one of the first management students to get attached to NEEV, suddenly stopped answering my mails and communicating. Two friends whom I trusted for the business, deceived me. One of them has been absconding, with Rs. 15,000 I had loaned him, for the last three months. Another one has disappeared with Rs. 2,000 whom I had loaned to cure his sister's illness. On top of it we are staring at a loan of Rs. 20 Lakhs for the next three years on which the interest we have to pay is another 9 Lakhs. I have to find about 150 sponsors for the rural kids of NEEV School, if the school has to survive and grow. With the volume of work I have to attend to, I get very scare time to mail potential sponsors. I have to make the hellish decision of going to school and working with the people and systems vs sitting in front of my laptop to write mail and raise funds. A gloom started descending in my life, thick as ever and nothing that my personal will could summon, dispel this gloom. The waters of faith in my soul's pitcher ebbed to their lowest level. After years, I let out my complaint to God !
The next morning I get a call from one of my friends in school days. We are talking after eighteen years. We talk our hearts out and he ends with a promise to sponsor one rural kid. Yet, the next morning, we get two calls. One was a call from my batch mate from REC Kurukshetra, whom I don't even recognize. He learnt about the Rural Kids Sponsorship Scheme through facebook and wants to sponsor a child. In the evening we get another call from a perfect stranger. He has heard about the sponsorship scheme from one of our previous year's sponsors and wants to sponsor a child. Again in the evening we get another call from another old friend of ours who is interested in purchasing 2000 soaps for Europe. And then, yet again, my faith bounces back, when in the evening I get a lovely mail from my friend who had stopped communicating to me.
If you ask me, these are the events, orchestrated by the Divine, that make NEEV: not scalable systems or models or social innovations, though we do dabble with them. My passion for NEEV is derived from the basic faith in human goodness and togetherness, the joy I derive in seeing humans coming together for a higher purpose. NEEV has given me a rare privilege to see God in action. The waters of faith in my soul's pitcher shall ebb again, but each time they are revived, it becomes more difficult to let go off the faith.
Social Entrepreneurship, for us at NEEV, is about living and practicing this Faith.
